In 2003 Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson
invited me to contribute an essay to a Vollmann anthology they
were assembling, eventually published as Expelled from Eden ,
which was to include essays by critics as well as Vollmann's own
work. I got their permission to string together all the Vollmann
reviews I'd written over the years, but at the last minute my essay
was cut from the volume's final line-up. This is what I submitted,
updated with my review of Europe Central and, ironically,
Expelled from Eden. – SM

Illness prevented me from reviewing Vollmann's first novel upon publication
in 1987, but seeing how poorly that book was received, I've tried to
review most subsequent works of his. The reviews are reprinted below
as they originally appeared, with repetitions and cheerleading excesses
intact, and only a few minor changes (mostly in punctuation). The opening
piece was a joint review of Vollmann's first book of short fiction
and David Foster Wallace's Girl with Curious Hair , but I've
retained only Vollmann's portion. I wasn't asked to review Argall anywhere,
so I've included the brief review I posted on Amazon.com .

* The Rainbow Stories

Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1989

Surveying the fiction published in 1987, a Belgian critic wrote me
the following year to ask,
"Where are the young William Gaddises and
Thomas Pynchons?" I wrote back recommending William T. Vollmann and
David Foster Wallace, both of whom published masterful, innovative
first novels in 1987: Vollmann a kind of cross between Naked Lunch and Gravity's
Rainbow entitled You Bright and Risen Angels, and Wallace
a novel called The Broom of the System, compared by some reviewers
to the early Pynchon but closer to the spirit of Barth or Elkin. Now,
coincidentally, both authors are publishing their first collections
of short fiction within a month of each other, bravura performances
that establish them both as heirs apparent to Barth, Burroughs, et
al., and as the two most promising and talented authors under thirty
writing today.

Like Kafka, Vollmann writes bizarre tales generated from pain and
alienation, feelings he reveals in numerous authorial asides and footnotes.
Most of the stories in his huge (543 pages) collection are actually
nonfiction, fragmented pieces on marginalized groups such as skinheads,
prostitutes, perverts, the homeless, and miscellaneous lost souls and
eccentrics. These are rather aimless people, and Vollmann often adopts
a kind of aimless narrative structure, simply recording brief epiphanies
in their wretched lives "like the recording angel" he claims to be
in the preface. There is an epigraph from Poe's "Berenice" that provides
both the structure and rationale for The Rainbow Stories— Misery
is manifold. The wretchedness of the earth is uniform. Overreaching
the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues
of that arch; as distinct too, yet as intimately blended"—and Vollmann
shares to a large degree Poe's morbidity, bizarre humor, outlandish
erudition, and superior prose style. Vollmann can write monumental
sentences with elaborate, extended metaphors, and has an ear for dialogue
as sharp as Gaddis's. His is an art of excess, which occasionally spills
over into a kind of recklessness, however: he seems a little too willing
to allow any stray thoughts, any tangential trivia to take their place
in his pages, and to find his aimless (and often repulsive) characters
more interesting than most of his readers are likely to. Still, Vollmann's
verbal prowess, empathy, and astonishing range put him in a class apart
from his contemporaries.

*

Whores for Gloria

Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1992

Vollmann's remarkable new novel is set in San Francisco's whore-infested
Tenderloin district, the same setting he used for "Ladies and Red Lights" in
his Rainbow Stories a few years back. The latter strung together
dozens of realistic episodes in almost documentary fashion; Whores
for Gloria is a far more ambitious and satisfying effort, a powerful
psychodrama of one man's quest for happiness and love. Wino Jimmy,
an aging Vietnam War vet, tries to keep his memory of Gloria alive
by paying whores (the only word Vollmann uses for them) to tell him
stories, which he in turn attributes to Gloria's past. Just as Dr.
Frankenstein assembled an ersatz man from various body parts, Jimmy
assembles his dream woman from the miserable lives of whores and precariously
maintains a modicum of happiness by looking forward to reuniting with
her. It's not clear whether Gloria was a childhood friend of Jimmy's,
or a whore he actually knew, or indeed a complete fantasy. Vollmann
keeps the reader close to Jimmy's point of view, so there's no telling
whether Gloria is real or not. Sordid realism develops into hallucinatory
fantasy and back again often in Whores for Gloria, appropriate
in a world where whores and transsexuals bloom instantly into fantasy
figures at a customer's request. In this regard Whores for Gloria is
reminiscent of Genet's Miracle of the Rose : lyricism cut with
brutal realism. It's a stunning performance.

*

Fathers and Crows and An Afghanistan
Picture Show

Washington Post Book World, 2 August 1992

From where I'm sitting, William T. Vollmann looks to be the most prodigiously
talented and historically important American novelist under 35, the
only one to come along in the last 10 years or so capable of filling
the seven-league boots of such mega-novelists as John Barth, William
Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon. Since 1987 he has published seven books—four
novels, two collections of short fiction, and a nonfiction account—which
tower over the work of his contemporaries by virtue of their enormous
range, huge ambition, stylistic daring, wide learning, audacious innovation,
and sardonic wit. If the man and his work are unknown to you, here's
a brief résumé:

He is 33 years old, graduated summa cum laude (in comparative literature)
from Cornell, and worked as a computer programmer until devoting himself
full-time to writing a few years ago. His first novel, You Bright
and Risen Angels, was published in 1987; a massive (635 pages),
surrealistic work that reads like a cross between Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow and William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, it is (like
them) a brilliant allegory of the conflicts between revolutionary and
repressive tendencies in politics and culture. It was followed in 1989
by The Rainbow Stories, another huge book, this one a collection
of stories and novellas mostly concerning marginal, disenfranchised
people—the homeless, skinheads, prostitutes. A year later, The Ice-Shirt was
published, an imaginative reconstruction and retelling of the Norse
legends about the discovery of America, and the first volume of his "Seven
Dreams" series (more on which below). Last year he published another
collection of short fiction, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, in
England (due out here in 1993), and earlier this year Pantheon brought
out Whores for Gloria , a short novel set in San Francisco's
Tenderloin district that fuses the lyricism of You Bright and Risen
Angels with the brutality of The Rainbow Stories, an achievement
that recalls Jean Genet's Miracle of the Rose. All this within
five years! Even the most talented of Vollmann's contemporaries—David
Foster Wallace, Susan Daitch, Richard Powers, Mary Caponegro—can't
match this in quantity or quality.

Now come Fathers and Crows, his longest novel to date, and An
Afghanistan Picture Show , his first book of straight nonfiction.
These genre distinctions are misleading, however: Much of Vollmann's
fiction uses nonfictional materials and techniques, and the author
is ever-present in his work, popping up in the most unlikely places
(11th-century Iceland, for example) to make an observation. Transformation
and transvestism are recurring themes in his work, and thus Vollmann
often dresses his fiction in nonfiction attire and vice versa, a
technique that not only contributes to current debates on genre/gender
distinctions but also looks back to the birth of the novel, a similar
period of cross-dressing between fiction and nonfiction.

An Afghanistan Picture Show, for example, exploits the traditional
literary theme of the innocent, altruistic Young Man (thus capitalized
in Vollmann's book) going out into the world, only to have his naive
worldview shattered. Barely out of college, Vollmann went to Afghanistan
in 1982 to witness the fighting and to "Save The Afghans" (again, his
caps). Instead, he spent most of his time fighting off various illnesses
and cooling his heels in Pakistan (entry into Soviet-held Afghanistan
was illegal), asking earnest but naive questions in an attempt to discover
just how one goes about saving a people quickly and efficiently.

The older author is quite hard on his younger self and his failed
"Pilgrim's Progress," yet the book succeeds not only in achieving
its original goal—to bring attention to the plight of Afghan refugees
(the first draft was finished in 1983 but couldn't find a publisher,
though the attention is still valid)—but also in dramatizing the limitations
of altruism and activism, the difficulty of understanding the context
of any culture other than your own, and how that difficulty imperils
writing books like this one. To overcome the last difficulty, Vollmann
keeps his materials raw: Instead of a polished narrative, it's a disruptive
text using many typefaces, incorporating bits of interviews, letters,
statements, flashbacks and flash-forwards, quotations from Wittgenstein,
footnoted asides—a mixed-media presentation that is all the more entertaining
and effective for its ragged, unconventional look. As a do-it-yourself
political primer, it is ingeniously ingenuous.
1

Those same devices are on display in Fathers and Crows , the
second volume of his "Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes." This
is a hugely ambitious project tracking American history from the time
of the Norsemen (The Ice-Shirt ) to our present age, an investigation
of American character, culture, and identity by way of seven pivotal
episodes in our history. There are no precedents for an enterprise
of this scope in our literature, though aspects of Vollmann's project
can be seen in Washington Irving's A History of New York , Pound's
history Cantos, and Marguerite Young's Angel in the Forest —all
of which are poetic, even fanciful attempts at history. But Vollmann
is closest in spirit to William Carlos Williams's In the American
Grain. The poet there complains: "It is an extraordinary phenomenon
that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what
we are has its origins in what the nation in the past has been;
that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do." Vollmann
is out to recover those sources, and we need to be reminded of them.

Like Williams's book, Fathers and Crows is a kind of documentary
history—in this case, of the French invasion of Canada in the 17 th
century, with particular attention to the conflicts between Jesuit
missionaries (resembling crows in their black garb) and the Native
American population. It's not a pretty story, and that's Vollmann's
point: The violence that percolates under the surface of contemporary
American life, erupting more and more often these days, has its origins
in the violence the Norsemen inflicted on the natives of Newfoundland
and in that more insidious violence of the imperialist sort that the
Jesuits brought with them. Again like Williams, Vollmann relies on
original documents (the Jesuit Relations, compilations of Indian
tales, etc.) and retells them in their same spirit, switching points
of view (and even the spelling of names) as his sources dictate.

The novel opens in modern Quebec with Vollmann (in his narrative persona
as William the Blind) researching the Blessed Catherine Tekakwitha,
a Mohawk convert of the 17th century on whom he has an adolescent
crush. Attempting a mystical fusion with his materials—as Jesuit founder
Saint Ignatius advised in his Spiritual Exercises , often quoted
in Fathers and Crows —the narrator recounts his tale like a
medium in a trance. His visionary approach occasionally takes liberties
with recorded history, duly noted in footnotes and voluminous endnotes;
here Vollmann often cites a few experts who read portions of his manuscript,
and his cheeky rationale for ignoring their sober advice is often amusing
and always interesting for the light it sheds on his artistic agenda.
Like the narrator of Tristram Shandy, Vollmann confides in
the reader occasionally, asking for patience at times, revealing personal
biases, drawing parallels to contemporary Canadian problems, and so
on. It's a self-conscious, postmodern approach to the historical novel,
and while a few reactionary purists (historical and literary) may take
exception, Fathers and Crows is a richly imaginative and boldly
innovative achievement, doing for the historical novel what Barth's Sot-Weed
Factor did 30 years ago, namely, reviving the genre for a new generation
of readers.

Even though Vollmann's sympathies are clearly with the Native Americans, Fathers
and Crows is neither a romantic evocation of the Noble Savage
nor a politically correct idealization. The Native Americans could
be as racist, sexist, and brutal as any European imperialist: They routinely tortured
and ate members of other tribes (women and children included) and
let their lust for iron hasten their own destruction. On the other
hand, a few of the French are admirable characters, especially Samuel
de Champlain (on whom Williams also wrote); some of the Jesuit priests
are like the Young Man of An Afghanistan Picture Show , too
idiotically innocent to be held accountable. A small attitude adjustment
on the part of the Jesuits—like that displayed by Roberto de Nobili
in India (also recounted here)—would have eased the Europeanization
of Canada, but faults on both sides caused the wounds that crippled
17 th -century Canada and that have reopened recently with the Quebecois
and Native American movements for autonomy.

With The Ice-Shirt and Fathers and Crows, there is
every indication that Vollmann's "Seven Dreams" septology will be the
most important literary project of the '90s (if he lives to complete
it—he has a history of risking his life to do field research). If you
consider yourself at all conversant with contemporary American fiction,
you must acquaint yourself with Vollmann's work and stay with him:
It promises to be quite a picture show.

*

Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs

Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993

Vollmann's newest book is, like The Rainbow Stories , a linked
collection of novellas and stories, and like his earlier book is peopled
mostly by the demimonde of San Francisco, with a few set in Third World
locales. "These stories are all epitaphs," Vollmann writes in an author's
note, and there is a valedictory, memorial air hanging over most of
these pieces as Vollmann tells autobiographical tales of people he's
known. His photographer friend Ken Miller appears in many of them—Dean
Moriarty to Vollmann's Sal Paradise—as does the mournful Elaine Suicide,
the focus (heroine is hardly the word) of the two longest and best
stories in the collection, "The Ghost of Magnetism" and "The Handcuff
Manual." In between the thirteen stories are thirteen brief epitaphs," ranging
from a paragraph to a few pages, each a concentrated vignette of death
or loss. The stylistic range is wide: "The Ghost of Magnetism" recalls Visions
of Cody -era Kerouac, while "The Grave of Lost Stories" is a deliberate
homage to Poe; the other stories use what is sometimes called "dirty
realism," but are enlivened with unexpected bursts of lyricism and
Vollmann's mordant humor. It is his saddest book, and one of his finest.

Vollmann is publishing so many books these days (three last year,
now this one, Butterfly Stories and The Rifles within
the next nine months) that his brilliance runs the risk of becoming
taken for granted. There's no telling how much longer he will be able
to keep up this prodigious rate of production, however, so readers
are well advised to take nothing for granted and to savor each new
book by this remarkable writer.

*

Butterfly Stories

Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1994

The search for love has rarely been portrayed as joylessly as it is
in Butterfly Stories. The unnamed narrator—variously called "the
butterfly boy," the journalist," "the husband"—moves through different
sorts of jungles, some literal, some metaphorical, so lonely and so
anxious to be happy that he can't help but fall in love with almost
any woman he meets, beginning with a girl who defended him from the
school bully, continuing with a lesbian met on a train to Istanbul,
and finally a Cambodian whore named Vanna, an illiterate taxi dancer
with whom he can't even converse. To maintain the bleak, hopeless nature
of the narrator's quest for love, Vollmann reins in his often extravagant
style for bare-bones recitation much of the time.

The novel moves from America to Europe to Asia, to northern Canada,
to England as the narrator flits about like a butterfly: not a symbol
of lighthearted caprice but of ceaseless wandering and searching. Towards
the end the narrator tests HIV-positive, but that is nothing to the
despair he feels at the loss of Vanna. The narrator's lack of shame
and pride is almost ascetic in its self-abnegation, giving him a pure
quality despite his incessant whoring. Butterfly Stories follows
from Vollmann's Whores for Gloria and Thirteen Stories to
explore the desperation that lovelessness can lead to.

*

The Rifles

Chicago Tribune, 6 March 1994

Novels in series are usually pursued only by genre writers: John Jakes's
Kent Family Chronicles or Marion Zimmer Bradley's endless Darkover
fantasy series don't have their counterparts in serious literary fiction,
where even the idea of a sequel is suspect.
2 (Joseph
Heller's forthcoming sequel to Catch-22 is already arousing
more suspicion than elation: How can it possibly be as good?) William
T. Vollmann is an exception, as might be expected from a writer who
is exceptional in every way. His voluminous output—this is his ninth
book in eight years—can be divided into two groups: raw, rather bizarre
fictions about prostitutes ( Butterfly Stories, Whores for Gloria,
The Rainbow Stories ) and a wildly ambitious historical series
about our continent called "Seven Dreams: A Book of North American
Landscapes." The series began with The Ice-Shirt (1990),
which concerns the first Norse visitors to America, and was followed
by Fathers
and Crows (1992), about the French and Jesuit conquest of Canada.
These are not straightforward historical novels; instead, they are
highly imaginative meditations on early American history, mixing verifiable
facts (the novels have as many footnotes and source notes as scholarly
history books do) with legends, myths, fanciful digressions, sarcastic
asides, and Vollmann's personal interpretation of the events. Those
two historical fantasias are among the finest fictional achievements
of our time. And while Vollmann's books about prostitutes are responsible
for much of the notoriety and popularity he currently enjoys, I suspect
it is the "Seven Dreams" series that will guarantee his place in
literary history.

The Rifles is the third installment but will be volume 6 in
the eventual seven-book scheme. It is the most experimental and daring
book yet in the series, pushing its central metaphor of metamorphosis
(Vollmann's initial inspiration for the series was Ovid) to almost
phantasmagoric lengths. Here, a contemporary American who calls himself
Captain Subzero becomes the reincarnation of Sir John Franklin, the
celebrated English explorer who perished in 1847 in search of the Northwest
Passage. Visiting Canada, Captain Subzero (clearly a version of Vollmann
himself) falls hopelessly in love with a rather hopeless native Canadian
Inuk woman named Reepah, and his doomed pursuit of her is aligned with
Franklin's own doomed pursuit. Similarly, Captain Subzero's wife back
home in the States becomes the reincarnation of Franklin's patient
wife Jane. In many episodes the four characters mingle outside the
bounds of chronology, which permits such bizarre anachronisms as Lady
Jane praising a King Crimson CD that Subzero plays for Reepah.

Reincarnation smacks of mysticism or fantasy, but Vollmann uses it
for other purposes: On the one hand, Subzero is engaging in a more
exaggerated form of the kind of identification readers make with characters
in the novels; on the other, he is concerned (as is Vollmann) with
the continuity of history, the fact that people and events in the past
continue to resonate in the present. It is a common European complaint
that Americans have no sense of history, and Vollmann seeks to redress
that fault by using radical techniques (such as reincarnation and deliberate
anachronism) to bring the past alive in a way that previous historical
novelists would not have dared.

The shifts from the Victorian Era to our own time can be disorienting,
but Vollmann's exquisite control of language helps keep the reader
on course. (To further assist the reader, the book includes a number
of hand-drawn maps.) The prose in the sections that recount Franklin's
explorations is fulsome, Victorian; that in the sections set in our
own time is choppy, curt. Vollmann's verbal prowess offers further
satisfactions: The descriptions of the landscapes of Canada's Northwest
Territories are especially good, and Vollmann's accounts of freezing
to death are harrowing. He also has an uncanny ability to project himself
into the most disparate characters, from a sailor on Franklin's ship
to an Inuk seal trapper.

Each volume of "Seven Dreams" discusses the impact of Western technology
and ideology on aboriginal Americans. The repeating rifle comes under
scrutiny here, especially in the way it changed the hunting patterns
of the Inuit and thus led to their current decline. (Vollmann attacks
the Canadian government's inhuman relocation programs in a portion
of the novel called "Straight Shots" and in his footnotes.) That Reepah
uses a shotgun to commit suicide brings the long history of firearms
in America to a tragic, personal conclusion for the brokenhearted Subzero.
Hopeless yearning unites Subzero with Franklin; "You want what you
can't have," Subzero confesses at one point. Perhaps each of us pursues
a Northwest Passage of some sort.

For readers new to the series, it would be better to start with The
Ice-Shirt or Fathers and Crows . But for those who have
been tracking Vollmann's career or who have a special interest in
Canadian history, The Rifles is not to be missed. As Lady
Franklin says of the King Crimson CD, it is "awfully marvelous, bloody
brilliant."

*

The Atlas

Chicago Tribune, 11 August 1996

In 1989, Tom Wolfe raised a stink when he wrote (in Harper's )
that novelists should stop examining their navels and go out and get
some real experience, do research like an ace journalist, so their
work would have some socio-historical depth. I doubt William T. Vollmann's
phantasmagoric novels are what Wolfe had in mind, but he certainly
does get around. In 1982, barely out of college, Vollmann traveled
to war-torn Afghanistan to see what he could do to help, a romantically
naive experience described in his nonfiction book An Afghanistan
Picture Show. Later in the '80s he began exploring Greenland and
Canada for the early volumes of his Seven Dreams" series of historical
novels. In recent years he has been sent by magazines such as Esquire and Spin to
the world's hot spots—Somalia, Bosnia, Thailand, Los Angeles after
the Rodney King riots—often at considerable risk. (He narrowly missed
being hit by snipers in Croatia; his two companions were killed.) All
of these travels inform his latest work of fiction, The Atlas.

The book is difficult to categorize: It resembles a short-story
collection in that there are 55 stories, most of them made up of four
or five brief vignettes—the prose equivalents of postcards or vacation
slides—linked by a particular image or memory. It is like a gazetteer
in that you can focus on particular places to read about, if you wish,
for the stories are all self-contained. It is also a mathematically
structured fiction like Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual or
John Barth's LETTERS. As Vollmann explains in the preface, the
book is organized like a palindrome—a sentence that reads the same
backwards and forwards. ("Able was I ere I saw Elba," Napoleon reputedly
said.) That is, the first story is linked to the last, the second to
the penultimate, and so on. At the center of the novel The Atlas is
a story called "The Atlas," which weaves together episodes from the
rest of the book. But the book The Atlas also resembles a novel
in that it explores the psychic landscape of a single narrator (never
named, but pretty clearly Vollmann), a man who is reminded of the world
within by the troubled world at large.

The narrator travels the world over to escape from an overwhelming
sense of loss and to find some sort of enduring love. By turns holy
fool and ugly American, he meets a wide variety of people and has numerous
adventures, most of them dismal. Occasionally he experiences moments
of beauty and rapture (especially in the chapter-story "Exalted by
the Wind"), but mostly what he encounters are reminders of losses:
his dead sister, the various women he has loved, former friends. Brooding
on the Thames a century ago, Joseph Conrad's Marlow, another world
traveler, announced, "And this also has been one of the dark places
of the earth." Vollmann likewise is concerned with the dark places
of the earth, and the heart of darkness within. They say travel expands
one's horizons, but it also brings into sharper focus our limitations,
our inability to connect with others in a meaningful way. As in Conrad's
novella, an air of desolation and despair hangs over Vollmann's Atlas.

The geographic range is extensive: Australia, Burma, Egypt, India,
Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, the Vatican City—he seems to have
been everywhere. (There are even stories set in Limbo and "The Sphere
of Stars.") The stylistic variety is just as wide. Some chapters, like "The
Red Song," are lyrical and surrealistic. "The Hill of Gold" imitates
the King James Bible, even to verse numbering. Some stories are rendered
in straightforward reportage, others in a stream-of-consciousness style
that can be difficult to follow. The book is thus an atlas of narrative
styles and rhetorical devices, from allegory to zeugma. If nothing
else, The Atlas offers further proof that Vollmann is perhaps
the most stylistically daring writer working today.

The crosscutting between several locales within the same story can
be disorienting, like being on a whirlwind tour and seeing too many
places in too short a period. But at its best, the technique is revelatory.
For example, one of the best stories, "Under the Grass," opens with
the narrator brooding on the day in 1968 when his negligence led to
his sister's drowning in a pool. (Sad to say, this tragedy actually
occurred when Vollmann was a boy, as he once revealed in an interview.)
Buried under the New England grass, his sister becomes a combination
of spirit guide and ghost to haunt the boy: "Now you're my white witch," he
says, like a narrator in one of Poe's tales (evoked here by the lush,
Gothic prose). From there we jump to an airport in Mauritius 25 years
later, where the narrator is so fatigued and disoriented that he asks
the authorities how to find his sister, a request that leads to comic
misunderstandings and ends with a taxi driver assuming the narrator
wants a prostitute. Then we jump to Thailand in the same year, at a
bar for prostitutes, where the narrator is feeling good for having
recently rescued a child-prostitute from "a nightmarish brothel in
the south." (This was the subject of a photo-essay Vollmann contributed
to Spin in 1993.) He has sex with a prostitute, then dreams
of seeing his sister's coffin, and wakes up "either screaming or thinking
I was screaming," realizing that his rescuing exploit was a failed
attempt to appease the spirit of the sister he failed to rescue 25
years ago. The story concludes in the catacombs of Rome, back in Poe
territory (this story is a micro-palindrome mirroring the macro-palindrome
of the book), where the narrator envisions a gruesome resurrection
for his sister, only to see her metamorphose into the presiding spirit
of "the girls from Firenze who drink the sun . . . the girls who sing
a-la-la- la! and ‘Ciao, Maria'"—a puzzling but cathartic ending
to a moving story.

For those who have followed Vollmann's career, The Atlas will
recall his Rainbow Stories and Thirteen Stories and Thirteen
Epitaphs. He also revisits some of the people and places of earlier
novels of his. Those who don't know his work might begin with The
Atlas : It functions as a summation of his characteristic themes
and settings, a display of his stylistic range, and an unsettling,
unforgettable tour of the world according to Vollmann.

*

The Royal Family

Rain Taxi, Fall 2000

William T. Vollmann writes about whores. Not prostitutes or hookers,
not call girls or sex workers, certainly not courtesans or concubines,
but whores: drug-addicted, disease-ridden, lying, cheating, filthy,
stupid wretches. And he loves them. He has already devoted two novels— Whores
for Gloria and Butterfly Stories —and several short stories
to these creatures, works that display a Christ-like compassion and
forbearance for them. The Royal Family is his longest and saddest
paean to whores, and I hope his last.

Like Steinbeck's East of Eden, The Royal Family is set in California
and is based on the Cain and Abel story. Henry Tyler (Cain) is a struggling
private detective in his forties; John (Abel) is an ambitious contract
lawyer, a stereotypical yuppie who prides himself on knowing where
to buy the finest ties in San Francisco, while Henry is something of
a bohemian (he has long hair and prefers City Lights bookstore over
a haberdashery). Both brothers are in love with the same person, a
rather unhappy Korean-born woman named Irene. She's married to John,
who is usually too busy to spend time with her, so Henry keeps her
company—until the day she commits suicide.

One of Henry's clients is a crass businessman named Jonas Brady who
wants to open a Las Vegas sex casino called Feminine Circus. He's heard
of a San Francisco woman known as the Queen of the Whores, whom he
feels would be a fine attraction at his casino, so he hires Henry to
track her down. As Henry trawls through the underworld searching for
this mysterious person, he's introduced to the members of the Queen's royal
family," a pool of cunt-sharks" with names like Sapphire, Chocolate,
Sunflower, Strawberry, and Domino. After Irene kills herself, he redoubles
his efforts to locate the Queen, hoping to find some kind of salvation
by passing through a refining fire of grief and degradation.

Henry's quest for the Queen rings with religious overtones supplied
by Vollmann's occasional references to Gnostic scripture and Canaanite
mythology. God set the Mark of Cain upon the brow of Abel's murderer
that he might be avoided by all decent people, and Henry comes to view
prostitutes—and eventually himself—as members of Cain's tribe. When
he finally meets the Queen, she provides him with rituals of degradation
intended to purge him of his grief for Irene, and when those don't
work, she becomes his lover. Eventually she disappears, and Henry gives
up his profession and becomes a hobo, riding the rails in search of
his lost Queen.

Vollmann's brutal, unflinching accounts of the lives of street whores
will not be to all readers' tastes. I was reminded of Samuel R. Delany's
transgressive novel The Mad Man and even of Sade's monstrous
works (Sade is, in fact, quoted in a prologue). And whoring is only
one of the activities depicted here that will discomfort the reader.
The secret of Brady's successful Feminine Circus turns out to be his
employment of retarded girls for his patrons' abuse. An autopsy is
described in colorful detail. A lively character named Dan Smooth,
an enthusiastic pedophile, regales Henry (and the reader) with a number
of stories. At one point Henry interrupts Smooth to say, "Your filth
gets pretty boring after a while"; this quotation appears on page 152
of the 780-page work and I almost gave up at that point in hearty agreement.
(Vollmann seems to be deliberately baiting the reader; on page 324,
still not yet halfway through, Tyler himself says, "If this were a
book I wouldn't even read the rest of it.")

Vollmann tests his readers' patience, but rewards it with occasional
flashes of black humor, sardonic social commentary, and bursts of phantasmagoric
prose (especially in the extraordinary Book XVII: "Buying Their Dream
House"). His wide erudition results in some far-flung analogies, and
his cavalier disregard for the conventions of fiction allows for some
interesting authorial asides and even an essay on the California bail
system. The theological parallels are intriguing, if not totally convincing,
and his obvious sympathy for whores and homeless people makes him a
better person than I. The Royal Family is an honest look at
an aspect of modern life that continues to be ignored or romanticized.
Dan Smooth could be speaking for Vollmann when he claims, "I'm the
only person in the whole wide world who always speaks the truth. You
know how to be sure it's the truth? Because it's ugly , man!" Consequently,
calling The Royal Family an ugly book is praise, not censure.

And of course it's good to have Vollmann back after a four-year absence.
He published nine books in the decade 1987-1996, most of them huge ,
and then hunkered down to finish a massive nonfiction book on violence
entitled Rising Up and Rising Down , only to have it rejected
by his publishers because of its length.
3 (During
this period Vollmann almost lost the use of his hands due to excessive
typing.) Vollmann's previous two books on whores are among his shortest
works, so perhaps with The Royal Family he has made his grand
statement on the subject and can return to what I and many of his other
admirers feel is his greatest achievement, the "Seven Dreams" series.
The three volumes Vollmann has published so far of this proposed seven-volume
history of North America afford him the widest scope for his considerable
talents, from minutely researched historical set pieces to phantasmagoric
tales of shape-shifting and metamorphoses. There's been nothing like
this in American literature since Washington Irving's A History
of New York, and Vollmann has already redefined the historical
novel with this behemothian project. I know how the story ends, but
I can't wait for him to resume telling it.

*

Argall

Amazon.com, 2 October 2001

With Argall , Vollmann makes a triumphant return to his ambitious "Seven
Dreams" series of novels, detailing the invasion of North America by
Europeans and the legacy of violence and oppression they left behind. Argall deals
with the British annexation of what they later called Virginia, and
focuses on three colorful characters: Pocahontas, Captain John Smith,
and the sinister Sir Samuel Argall, who eventually kidnaps Pocahontas
and introduces slavery into the New World.

As the voluminous notes attest, Vollmann has done his homework and
gives us what is probably the most historically accurate version of
the Pocahontas story. And he does so in an astonishing re-creation
of Elizabethan prose. This isn't the elegant Augustan prose adapted
by Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor and Pynchon in Mason & Dixon ;
this is the earlier, racier prose of the young turks of Shakespeare's
day like Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and especially Thomas Nashe.
As one of Vollmann's sources says of that era, "the whole style of
the day was inflated—in writing and in living"; hence Vollmann uses
a suitably inflated style that captures the age in all its vitality
and vulgarity. As both a historical novel and a linguistic tour de
force, Argall is a magnificent achievement.

*

Rising Up and Rising Down

Washington Post Book World, 17 December 2003

A little over a hundred years ago, Sir James G. Frazer set out to
explain a minor point in Classical scholarship: the rule that regulated
the succession to the priesthood at a shrine in Italy devoted to the
goddess Diana. But over the next 15 years, as he realized every aspect
of the rule had a history to be explicated, and as he found parallels
in other cultures, his project ballooned into the 12-volume Golden
Bough , a monumental study of the evolution of magic and superstition
into religion, an influential work cited by writers as diverse as T.
S. Eliot, Carl Jung, William Gaddis, and Jim Morrison.

Twenty years ago, novelist William T. Vollmann set out to answer a
similar deceptively simple question: When is violence justified? Most
people have a stock response: Never, says the pacifist. Only in self-defense
or wartime, many would say. Whenever anyone looks at me funny, a bully
would say. Whenever I'm doing God's work, a religious fanatic would
say. The new century threatens to be even more violent than the last,
so it is a question that deserves a more considered response, a challenge
Vollmann has met with a massive work that provides an encyclopedic
survey of violence and a general field theory for its justifiability.

The work is divided in two parts: the first four volumes are what
Vollmann calls the "theoretical" part of the study—drawn mostly from
historical accounts of violence—while volumes 5 and 6 deal with contemporary
zones of violence, based on Vollmann's far-flung travels. A concluding
volume contains a digest of his "moral calculus" (more on which below),
appendices, supplementary materials, and a 44-page bibliography where
Herodotus is followed by a book on bear attacks, and where a translation
of the medieval Two Lives of Charlemagne by Einhard and Notker
the Stammerer precedes John Ellis's Social History of the Machine
Gun. Eclectic" doesn't even begin to describe it.

To organize his unruly subject, Vollmann divides acts of violence
into their various possible defenses: self-defense (the only clearly
justified use of violence according to Vollmann), defense of homeland,
of honor, authority, race, creed, gender, and more recent concerns
such as defense of earth against polluters and defense of animals.
For his examples, Vollmann draws on nearly all eras of recorded history—in
volume 2 he tosses off "A Survey-History of Property from Nomadic Times
to the Russian Revolution"—and treats nearly every culture on earth,
from the hapless Afghans to the Zulu.

The scope is immense, and his reading wide. Though not an academic,
Vollmann scrupulously documents everything in hundreds of source notes
(his philanthropic publisher hired a team of fact-checkers to help)
and goes out of his way to be as fair and respectful toward his material
as possible. He is so open-minded that he can identify and praise Trotsky's
few virtues while admitting "To Trotsky I'd be scum." There's no agenda,
no pre-ordained thesis, no political bias: he simply wants to understand
violence and share his findings. Nor is he prescriptive; though sickened
by violence, he's concerned here with how to judge it, not how to eradicate
it. We know how to eradicate it: as Vollmann counsels, just
observe the Golden Rule, perhaps fleshed out with the UN's 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights , but that's easier said than done.

Like Frazer, Vollmann's method is comparative: though a "principal moral
actor" stars in each section—"Trotsky in Defense of Authority," "Cortez
in Defense of Ground"—other actors from other eras of history make
their appearances. "For much the same reason that one opera frequently
recalls another," Vollmann notes, "the student of history will find
that many an atrocity will be recapitulated somewhere down the centuries." In
his chapter on "Defense of Honor," Vollmann finds common ground between
the Charge of the Light Brigade (remembered for its 'gallantry'—in
other words, for its "tactical idiocy"), Joan of Arc, Napoleon, King
Olaf's forced conversions in medieval Norway, Sun-tzu, and Mao Zedong's
personal physician. Referring to young inmates of juvenile hall in
the 1950s, Vollmann writes: "And now Blinky has disturbed his prestige
again, like the Roman Prince Maxentius throwing down the statues of
the Roman Emperor Constantine. Abbot had better show some ‘heart.'
(‘When a brave man faces death,' says Socrates, ‘he does so for fear
of something worse.')" A discussion of Plato's totalitarian
ideals includes an aside on "his half-brother Adolf Hitler" and an
anecdote about a four-year-old girl whose parents allowed her to starve
to death. A single paragraph will join a Revolutionary War Minuteman,
an 1870s pioneer woman, and sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius.
He'll defend his right to carry a gun with a citation from the Old
Norse Poetic Edda.

Throughout, the emphasis is on individual responsibility for
acts of violence. Vollmann contemptuously dismisses the claims of "social
forces" and "historical goals" that so many revolutionaries and tyrants
hide behind, identifies the monstrous arrogance of terrorists who would
impose their beliefs on others, and condemns the spinelessness of those
who defend their participation in atrocities by claiming to be "following
orders." (As the personified Technology in Thomas Pynchon's World War
II novel Gravity's Rainbow says at one point, "‘Do you think
we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name
and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles
and blow up a block full of civilians?'") Vollmann indicts not only
the obvious mass-murderers of history—Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot,
Saddam Hussein—but those who encouraged widespread violence (Robespierre,
Trotsky) or made questionable decisions that led to it, like Abraham
Lincoln. (Vollmann reminds us that Lincoln started the Civil War not
to free slaves but to assert the superiority of federal rights over
states' rights, a dubious justification for the four years of bloodshed
that resulted.)

As Vollmann proceeds through the various defenses of violence, he
codifies his findings as part of a "moral calculus," an attempt to
establish a checklist by which any act of violence can be judge as
justifiable or not. Not surprisingly, he finds most acts of violence
unjustified, excepting only self-defense and violence committed during
a justified war, which even then must be tightly restricted. (According
to Vollmann's calculus, the Bush Administration's recent invasion of
Iraq is totally unjustified because it fails the test of imminence,
among other reasons.) Vollmann's moral calculus is presented in digest
form on pp. 33-119 in the final volume, and I wish this section could
be printed as a pamphlet and distributed worldwide. Every politician,
soldier, activist, and budding revolutionary deserves to read it, if
no more of Rising Up and Rising Down.

(And about that odd title: a "rising up" is a justified act of violence,
a "rising down" an unjustified one.)

Unlike Frazer, who never left his library, Vollmann supplements his
immense reading with fieldwork done in some of the most dangerous places
on earth. Volumes 5 and 6 record his trips to Cambodia, Thailand, Burma,
Japan, the former Yugoslavia, Madagascar, the Congo, Somalia, Malaysia,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Colombia, Jamaica, and various parts of the
United States. Some of these essays were published in the 1990s in
such magazines as Spin, Gear, Esquire, and the New
Yorker , always in severely edited form, and for many readers these
will be the most enjoyable volumes of Rising Up and Rising Down —though "enjoyable" is
hardly the word for this parade of misery.

In almost every case Vollmann shows the effects of violence on those
least able to avoid it: the poor. Some of these make for rather thrilling
reading—like Vollmann's account of his rescue of a 12-year-old sex
slave from a Thai brothel—while others are the bleakest things you'll
ever read. A few are Apocalypse Now- type quests for mysterious
figures—Vollmann was one of the few to interview Khun Sa, the "Opium
King" of Burma, and Hadji Amin, the "Old Man" of the PULO separatist
movement in Thailand—but most consist of interviews with the wretched
of the earth as they suffer from the effects of weak or illegitimate
governments. I lost count of the number of times Vollmann was almost
killed during these adventures.

Here in the States Vollmann hangs with Cambodian immigrant gang-bangers,
with suicidal Apache teenagers on an Arizona reservation, with mourners
after the Columbine Massacre, with superstitious blacks down South
(who resort to magic, voodoo, Christianity, Santería, and other
primitive beliefs to ward off violence), and with paranoid whites in
the Pacific Northwest, whose very real concern with governmental abrogation
of their rights gets mixed up with anti-Semitism, racism, conspiracy
theories, and Bible-fueled apocalyptic fears.

Rising Up and Rising Down is a monumental achievement on several
levels: as a hair-rising survey of mankind's propensity for violence,
as a one-man attempt to construct a system of ethics, as a successful
exercise in objective analysis (almost non-existent in today's partisan,
ideological, politicized, spin-doctored, theory-muddled public discourse),
and a demonstration of the importance of empathy, whether in writing
a book like this or simply dealing with fellow human beings. It can
be an exhausting, depressing read, but with the ever-growing role of
violence in our lives, it is an essential read. And the amazing fact
that during the 20 years he spent writing Rising Up and Rising Down Vollmann
also published a dozen extraordinary books of fiction—many in the 700-page
range and packed with historical research as deep as that on display
here—elevates this achievement beyond the realm of mere mortals.

*

Europe Central

Expelled from Eden: A William
T. Vollmann Reader

Washington Post Book World, 17 April 2005

The Vollmann juggernaut rolls on. Instead of taking a well-deserved
rest after publishing his 7-volume, 3300-page Rising Up and Rising
Down in the fall of 2003, he quickly prepared a 1-volume abridgement—a
mere 733 pages, published by Ecco last fall—then collaborated with
critic Larry McCaffery and novelist Michael Hemmingson on Expelled
from Eden, continued to publish essays and reviews in various journals,
and then completed his new 800-page novel Europe Central while
recovering from a broken pelvis. He's published 15 books in the last
18 years, half of them 600 pages or longer, and with no falling off
in quality or innovation. He's what they used to call a shock worker
back in the USSR.

The former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are the settings for his
new novel, a grimly magnificent dramatization of the impossible moral
choices forced on individuals by those totalitarian regimes. Ranging
from 1914 to 1975, the book is organized as a series of paired stories,
like Plutarch's Parallel Lives, comparing a German and a Russian
facing a similar situation. For example, one set pairs Soviet general
Andrei Vlasov, who deserted his army for the enemy's, with Field-Marshal
Friedrich Paulus, a Nazi who collaborated with the Communists after
capture. But most are not so neat. The danger of using violent means
to attain idealistic ends is the point of the first pair of stories,
which contrasts the revolutionary idealist Fanya Kaplan, whose failed
attempt to assassinate Lenin in 1918 unleashed the Red Terror wave
of executions, with a nameless German whose patriotic idealism inspires
him to cheer Kaiser Wilhelm's decision to begin World War I; and "right
beside me a pale little man, probably a tramp, with disheveled hair
and a dark trapezoidal mustache, began to caper, smiling at the world
with a sleepwalker's eyes."

Many of the stories focus on four artists, tracking their attempts
to create meaningful art under regimes that are hostile to any art
that doesn't celebrate official patriotic ideals in social-realist
form. The German Käthe Kollwitz persists with her stark engravings
depicting the victims of oppression despite charges of pessimism. The
Russian Anna Akhmatova tries to keep her poetry free of political themes,
and pays the price of non-publication for decades, until she capitulates
in order to rescue her son from a Siberian prison. The Soviet filmmaker
Roman Karmen, by contrast, has an easier time of it by producing films
that win official approval. Vollmann devotes the most pages to the
case of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, the subject of several
long stories, who played a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities
throughout his career, outwardly submitting to their criticism and corrections" while
managing to write deeply personal music and avoid joining the Party
until near the end of his life.

Like a method actor immersing himself in a role, Vollmann tells most
of his stories from the point of view of their protagonists or a related
character—the apparatchik Comrade Alexandrov relates many of the Soviet
stories—relying on his immense research to empathize with his characters.
(There are 50 pages of source notes at the end of the book, scrupulously
documenting his occasional departures from the historical record for
artistic purposes.) He shows that most moral decisions are not abstract
applications of principles but the complicated result of cultural conditioning
and personal psychology, a muddy mix of dreams, neuroses, fairy tales,
nationalism, perversion, pride, and fear. His German characters are
motivated as much by myths and Wagnerian opera as by political considerations,
and communist double-speak keeps most of his Soviet characters from
even thinking straight. Vollmann's language beautifully captures these
warring conflicts, moving from lyricism to military strategy to hallucination
to erotic longing as his characters navigate their way through a landscape
of atrocities—and not just the ones perpetrated by the Nazis and the
Communists. A Russian character notes: "On the night of 13-14.2.45,
the British and the Americans burned thirty-five thousand people, mainly
civilians, in an incendiary bombing raid in Dresden. This slightly
bettered the Nazi achievement at Babi Yar, where only thirty-three
thousand Jews had been machined-gunned."

I've reviewed nearly all of Vollmann's books over the years
and am running out of superlatives; suffice it to say, if you've been
following Vollmann's extraordinary career, Europe Central may
be his best novel yet. If you haven't, you might want to begin with Expelled
from Eden, a well-organized collection of selections from his works,
uncollected essays and letters, poems, all enclosed by very useful
commentary from the editors. Vollmann's willingness to go against the
preferred social realism of our day, enabled by his publisher's willingness
to allow him to unfold his Wagnerian epics at full length, makes him
a hero of our time.

___________________________________

l. After
9/11, every publisher with rights to a book on Afghanistan rushed a
new edition into print, but not only did An Afghanistan Picture
Show fail to be reprinted
at that time, it is the only Vollmann book never to have been issued
in paperback. [Author's note, 2003]

2. I
should have inserted "nowadays" somewhere
in this sentence. Literary history of course contains numerous series—Balzac's La
Comédie humaine , Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart , Galsworthy's Forsyte
Saga, Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter (a favorite of Vollmann's),
Kerouac's Legend of Duluoz —but contemporary literary series
are rare. James McCourt's delightful and still-growing Mawrdew Czgowchwz
Saga is the only one that comes to mind.

3. In
May 2002 McSweeney's Books announced it would publish this work in
six volumes in the Fall 2002, but postponed it until the following
year.